I picked up Felix at his place and we drove to my family's cabin just east of
Arnold. The drive took 4 hours, not too bad for a Friday getaway from the Bay
Area, but a good 75 minutes longer than it should have been. We retired
early, since I wanted to get an early start, what with it getting dark earlier
at this time of year. The alarm went off at 6, and I ate breakfast. Felix
soon came upstairs and ate, then we hit the road at 6:30. The drive to the
Noble Canyon trailhead took about an hour, and after a bit of fussing with my
equipment, we hit the trail at 7:50.

According to my car's outside thermometer, it was 35°F as we set out -
chilly, but not too bad, and we warmed quickly as we hiked. I'd decided to
start from the Noble Canyon trailhead, rather than the PCT at Highway 4
because 1) I'd already hiked to Noble Lake via the PCT on July 4th, and 2) although longer, the Noble
Canyon Trail is much more gently graded - I didn't enjoy climbing back up to
Highway 4 on my return trip in July! Unfortunately, we lost the trail pretty
quickly and had to travel crosscountry along Noble Creek. Normally I wouldn't
have minded too much, but the majority of this hike was going to be off-trail,
and I wanted to enjoy what trail we could! We found the trail again, only to
lose it almost immediately - argh! Fortunately, since I'd hiked here once
before, I knew the general direction we wanted to go. We did wind up going up
a fairly steep
ridge, and arrived above our first destination, Noble Lake. We
had to hike down a little bit to a
lakelet above
Noble Lake to filter some water, as this would be our last opportunity for 7+
miles of steep crosscountry trekking.

Our offtrail excursion actually saved us some mileage (with a price to pay in
steepness), and we quickly headed up to the saddle between peaks 10824 and
9741. I remembered having a tough time getting up Highland's false summit,
Peak 10824 in July, and was dreading slogging up its scree-lined slopes again.
The scree was not too bad, only slightly irritating, but the steepness really,
really slowed us down. An hour, and not even a mile after we left the saddle,
we summited Peak 10824 and were treated to most
excellent views of Highland and
Silver peaks. If we hadn't known that 10824 was a false summit, we would
have been really, really sad, as Highland is still a good (and steep) ways
away! I felt slightly silly that Barry and I hadn't quite summited 10824 on
July 4th, as where we stopped was at most 10 minutes from the summit, but we
didn't know that then. Felix and I stayed a little bit on the summit,
enjoying the great views. It was pretty hazy, but we could still make out Highland Lakes in the
distance, with the Dardanelles far beyond.

It was some fun, but slow, class 3
downclimbing from Peak 10824's summit to the saddle between it and
Highland Peak, losing about 300 feet in 0.4 miles. This was the first even
remotely technical climbing I had done in many years, and I enjoyed it a good
deal. From the saddle, Highland Peak looked somewhat intimidating 400 feet
above and 0.3mi beyond us. We snacked some at the saddle and enjoyed a nice
view of Silver Peak
and the mountains to the
north.

To my surprise, the remaining climb up to Highland was pretty fast and not at
all difficult, primarily a boulder hop on the vast pile of talus that is
the upper reaches of the peak. I actually thought we were arriving at a false
summit, but upon seeing the USGS survey
marker (and the fact that there was nowhere to go but down for miles
around :), I knew we were there. This was my first off-trail peak (my only
on-trail ones previously were Mt. Tallac and Mt. Whitney), and it was pretty sweet! We signed the summit
register, and took in the views, which weren't really very different than
those from Peak 10824, except for the view of Peak 10824 itself. We
had a good view of Sonora and Stanislaus peaks in the distance, which I
planned to attempt the following weekend. It was 57°F at the summit, but
felt much warmer, as I was perfectly comfortable in short sleeves and light
pants. We decided to leave Silver Peak for another day, as it was getting on
in the day, and the traverse and summiting of both of Silver's peaks would
take a couple of hours most likely. This would turn out to be a very wise
decision!

There was some more fun class 3 downclimbing off of Highland's peak, and some
rather steeper and trickier routefinding than we'd expected getting to the
saddle between Highland and Silver peaks. After what seemed like entirely too
much time, we arrived at the saddle, and began our descent to Noble Canyon.

We left the saddle and headed more-or-less east towards Noble Canyon along a
rather steep
ridge. There was a scrubby meadow that looked like a reasonable
target (it wasn't), and we headed towards it, only to find it was calf-high in
fairly thick brush - bleah! There were cow paths (what the heck were cows
doing up here?!?) here and there, and we stuck to those as best we could. The
"meadow", although
less steep than the previous terrain, was still quite non-level, and it got
much, much worse once we reached its end.

Our final leg of descent to Noble Canyon was ridiculously steep - definitely
not the route recommended in our guidebook, but it did take us closer to the
car. In several places we were more doing a controlled slide than actually
hiking, as the surface was extremely loose in places, and quite steep
throughout. We intersected a dry creekbed, and followed that, figuring it
would eventually dump us out on Noble Creek, and we could then find our trail
with relative ease. As luck would have it, we found the trail much sooner
than I expected, and it was a few short and easy miles back to the car. We
finished at about 6:20, making this a very long day!

This was probably not the best choice for my first backcountry peak, but what
the heck - it was a fun adventure (if a painful one!). The other peaks in the
area should be easy by comparison (famous last words...)!